


Humbug

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [48]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-18 00:57:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7293001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Self-made freaks, she thought, their outsides polished into respectability.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Humbug

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 2.21 "Humbug"  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

"Imagine going through your whole life looking like that," said Doctor Blockhead, gesturing dismissively at Mulder, and for a moment, Scully did. For a moment, she imagined herself tall, lean, carelessly masculine. Mulder was standing with one foot on the stairs of the trailer, a portrait of casual grace. He looked like an advertisement for a new line of trenchcoats, or more probably, a set of ties that would clash with everything. 

God, the things she could accomplish in Mulder's body. She was lost in a vision of cutting through a crowd just by walking with a determined stride, being taken seriously in meetings by the men flipping solemnly through their files. "You can do anything, Starbuck," her father had always told her, but she'd known even then it was a world of men, watching her mother with the other Navy wives, yielding their authority the moment their husbands stepped through the door. She had lost count of the times she had heard the phrase "when your father gets home", delivered with the certain serenity that the captain would solve everything. But she would gain credibility looking like any man, even the jigsawed Conundrum. There were particular advantages to Mulder's body. She tried not to consider them, most of the time, but she was poignantly aware of his finer points.

A person could get lost in Mulder's bosky eyes. Under his brooding brow, they were a haunted wood full of murky dells and verdigris horrors and startling loveliness. His tendency to wear his shirts blousy hid the sleekness of his physique, but she knew the firmness of his shoulders and stomach. He was lithe and strong underneath his boxy suits. She could delineate his muscles by touch: trapezius, oblique, quadrilateral. She knew the late-night mumble of his voice, tuned to the frequency that trembled in her bones. She knew the strength of his hands and the length of his fingers. She ignored it most of the time, but the knowledge was there, underneath her careful conscious blockades, underneath "he's my partner" and "we work together" and "don't risk your career for a crush" and "what a beautiful disaster we would be". 

Blockhead was still talking. "That's why it's left up to the self-made freaks like me and the Conundrum to remind people."

Mulder, too, was a self-made freak, though Blockhead would never accept that. She was remaking herself in the same image, bit by bit, as isolated and transient as the circus people. Blockhead couldn't see the markers of their strangeness, but the other agents could. There were finer gradations of freakhood than webbed feet or body modification. Blockhead wouldn't want to hear that either. He and Mulder weren't so different, really, two manifestations of what it looked like to resist the status quo. "Remind people of what?" Scully asked. 

"Nature abhors normality," Blockhead said. "It can't go very long without creating a mutant. Do you know why?"

Yes, she thought, but instead she said, "No, why?" Most people didn't want the universe explained to them; the extent of her years of study of science would mean little to a man who slept on a bed of nails and pierced himself recreationally. 

"I don't either," Blockhead said. "It's a mystery. Maybe some mysteries are never meant to be solved."

And yet, she kept trying. They were working at cross-purposes, she and these self-described freaks. She sought to explain the world; they fought to keep the inexplicable in it, to call it magic, to call it mystifying. The Dog-Faced Boy with his hypertrichosis. The Conundrum biting the heads off fish. Blockhead himself, ignoring the frantic signals of his nervous system. She could explain all of it, but there was a way in which she felt she was telling the rest of humanity there was no Santa Claus. She could pin these specimens down in a box, label their abnormalities, sum up their incomprehensible oddities in fifty words or less. But it would make the world a little less wonderful, and even freaks had to make a living.

She watched Blockhead get into his car, a ramshackle vehicle piled high with the accoutrements of his work. Mulder wandered over to her side. She ignored the miniscule frisson that shivered up her spine, insulating herself with the well-worn excuses. Imagine a world that looked like Mulder, she thought: brooding, brilliant, with a quick tongue and an easy laugh to temper the slow roil of his anger. The world could do worse. 

"What's the matter with your friend?" Mulder asked, nodding at the Conundrum.

"I don't know what his problem is," said Doctor Blockhead. "Maybe it's the Florida heat."

They talked around the Conundrum as if he couldn't hear them. It was rude, Scully thought. "Hope it's nothing serious," she said, directed to both of them.

"Probably something I ate," said the Conundrum, opening one eye and grinning at them. Blockhead stepped on the accelerator and the car rattled off, carrying its curious burdens. 

She looked up at Mulder.

"Do you think…?" she began.

"We'll never know," he said. "But it would answer a few questions, wouldn't it?"

"Maybe I don't need every question answered," she said. "Live fish are one thing, Mulder, but a human?"

"A mutated human," he reminded her. "Almost parasitic in nature."

"Mutation can happen to any of us," she argued. "It didn't mean that Leonard had any less right to live."

"Leonard allegedly murdered people," Mulder said. "Including his host. His brother. I think it's possible justice was served in this case."

"Justice isn't served raw," she muttered, and regretted it, but Mulder smiled ruefully and took her point. 

"Whether the Conundrum took the law into his own hands, we may never know," he said. "Imagine this case going through the court system, Scully."

"Leonard couldn't have survived long enough to be sentenced," she said. "Unless he could have found another host."

"Not a lot of volunteers for that position," Mulder said. "If his history is anything to go by."

"He would have had to have been incarcerated in an incubator," Scully mused. "If that would have even sustained him. It might have been humiliating, for an adult, if he were even judged competent to stand trial."

"It's out of our hands," Mulder told her, his hand on her shoulder steering her back to their car. "Nature is red in tooth and claw, Scully, and we forget that those teeth can be ours."

"I'm reminded of that every time I watch you eat barbecue," she teased, and Mulder smiled.

"Lunch?" he asked. 

"Not barbecue," she told him, getting into the car. "Or sushi."

"I'm sure we can find a salad bar," he said, and they drove away from the trailer park. Scully didn't look back, but she could feel the hollow place where the sense of wonder had been, like the gap left after a tooth was pulled. The people would find a way to fill it: invent another Fiji Mermaid, or transfer their faith to some other miracle cure. Nature abhorred normality, perhaps, but it certainly abhorred a vacuum. The emptiness the circus left would be filled. Some other strangeness would take its place, invented or discovered. 

She stole a sideways glance at Mulder, imagining him covered in an intricate labyrinth of tattoos, his body turned into a mystery to be unraveled, a story to be read aloud. Self-made freaks, she thought, their outsides polished into respectability, their strangeness bitten back before it could escape, though Mulder spoke just enough of it to keep the others at a distance. There was a freedom in embracing it. At least the Conundrum and Doctor Blockhead had no fear of being discovered. Scully was always waiting to be found out, and none of her credentials could protect her. She was inexorably strange: strange to be a woman in the cold, hard-edged world of science; strange to find comfort in her faith and her work both; strange to be a woman in an organization built by men, for men; strange to embrace justice and mercy together. 

"Penny for your thoughts, Scully," Mulder said, gnawing on a sunflower seed.

"It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world," she said, and he laughed. 

"You want to hit the circus after this?" he asked.

"No, thank you," she said. "There's enough weirdness in my life as it is." She cut her eyes at him and caught his gaze. 

He smirked, looking back at the road. "Scully, I'm blushing. You want to stop and get piercings before we leave? A little souvenir?"

"Not this trip," she said. 

"That's not a solid no," he teased.

"I can't discount the possibility," she said, "no matter how extreme it may seem to the untrained observer."

"His and hers," he mused. "Or we could get a UFO tattooed on our asses."

"Maybe you should get your address and your badge number instead," she teased. "Or mine. 'If found, return to Dana Scully'. That might eliminate some confusion." Or create some, she thought, but that was another matter, for another day.

"The ever practical Agent Scully," he said. "Actually, you'd look good with a nose piercing." He reached out to brush a finger across her cheek. "Add a little sparkle." 

"Maybe next time," she said, gazing out the window, away from the crinkle of his eyes as he laughed, away from the sly smile that lingered at the corner of his mouth. 

Maybe everyone's future didn't look like Mulder, but maybe hers did, one way or another. She could wait to find out.


End file.
